Advanced Audience Targeting for Remarketing #SMX

If you can do precise audience targeting, you can have more control over who sees your ads — and get more conversions for your marketing buck! In this in-depth SMX West 2016 session, we’ll find out how to use advanced targeting techniques like remarketing lists, custom affinity lists, YouTube remarketing and more. The goal is to maximize your ad campaign ROI.

Mark Irvine is a data scientist who researches industry trends in PPC. Dating is a lot like audience targeting. More of us are doing it online. It can be hard to find someone interested in you. Sometimes you’re going to stalk them (just a little bit). Your first impressions mean everything. It’s too easy to lose a good fit by not following through. He suggests approaching digital marketing like a courtship.

#1: Finding Someone New

Finding your ideal match is a journey. You don’t always know what you’re looking for right away. Rethink your key audiences. 40% of baby product purchasers live in households without children! Use Google Analytics to re-think the key audiences for your campaigns. He puts up a slide showing the conversion rate per in-market segment (found by opening Audience > Interests > Affinity Categories in GA). which helps you identify the key, most profitable demographics for your campaigns.

#2: The Chase

Chase past visitors with remarketing. Remarketing is going to reengage your best visitors. Highly engaged users are more likely to later convert. Remarketing is not just for display anymore! The same trends of conversion for engaged users are true across platforms, and users are 76 percent more likely to click on a remarketing ad! Google Customer Match boasts some of the best conversion rates in the industry.

(Note: Another WordStream speaker delved into Customer Match earlier this week; you can read Cleo Hage’s session liveblog for more on that.)

#3: The First Date

Choose where to court your audience. Couple relevant audiences with relevant website targets to boast positive engagement. Find your content match. Look to GA to find top referral placements — these will also be your top ad placements.

Get off mobile and app ads, though. Nearly half of all in-app ad clicks were found to be accidental. Typically we see mobile apps ad placements with a high CTR but disappointing conversion rate. Disclude your ads from in-app placement.

#4: Break the Dumb Rules

Don’t limit yourself with short membership duration or impression caps. This happens because it’s an industry best practice to set low impression caps to prevent annoying users. But actions speak louder than words. Users are more likely to click on remarketing ads when they’ve seen it 4, 5 or 6 times. Impression caps can hurt more than help, and ads are almost never served to their full impression cap. (He gives a few examples: a daily impression cap of 2 is delivered an average of 1.21 times; a cap of 3 gets an average of 1.54 impressions; 4 averages 1.75 impressions; etc.) Ad exposure increases CVR.

Give people time. Use your GA Time Lag Report to determine how long users wait before they buy. Set your membership duration to include 95 percent of your sales. Nurture people who are legitimately in your sales funnel even if you’re not sure what the time period should be.

Amy Bishop: Best Practices for Audience Targeting in Remarketing

Before we can talk about audiences, we first have to talk about the goal of the campaign. Because remarketing is not a goal, even though successful remarketing is helpful. Think of what problem you’re solving, what you have that they need or want. This will help you define your audience.

Remarketing goals

Keeping consumers engaged throughout a long buying cycle

Closing the sale

Bringing back previous buyers

Prospecting (lookalikes)

Announcing new products

Re-engaging consumers with accessories or add-ons

Remarketing lists for search ads:

Bid up valuable lists within search campaigns

Exclude lists from non-RLSA

Typically have lower CPCs and CPAs than non-RLSA campaigns.

The funny thing is this is a lower funnel audience, but we’re paying less for them.

Remarketing lists for shopping ads are similar to RLSA but for Shopping.

Remarketing for Dynamic Search Ads — RDSA is great for query mining with a safety.

Social remarketing is another push channel:

Great for the mobile reach

A lot of different ad formats

Great for prospecting

Social engagement can help provide trust and expand reach and Lookalike Audiences.

Audiences

Now you have your goals and your channel. It’s time to talk about the audience you want to achieve those goals.

Out with the old: Remarketing to everyone who hits the home page is out. Build informed remarketing lists using information you can gather from:

Pages visited

Source/medium/campaign information

Actions taken on site (events, goals, conversions)

Location

Demographics

Example lists:

Loyalists (via email, or UI login)

Completed a micro-conversion

Visited a page that speaks to their needs (product, industry)

Remarketing lists for channels that don’t offer remarketing

Hyperlocal lists

Layering lists for specificity

Seasonal or recurring needs

Leads that haven’t closed

If they’ve visited a page that speaks to their needs, hit them with another page, product or industry, that also speaks to that need. Layer lists for specificity.

They created lists for demographics, crossed them with segmented lists, and were able to zone in on age ranges that performed best.

You might be thinking, OK, segmented lists perform better but there’s still a lot of volume coming from other lists that aren’t segmented. So, break out segmented lists as much as you can and create a catch-all campaign that excludes the segmented list. If your catch-all is bigger than your segmented lists, you may want to capture more information. The end goal is the primary conversion, but it shouldn’t be all or nothing for data collection. What can you get from them the first time they visit your site so you can deliver the right creative and product to them in remarketing?

Example funnel:

Remarketing ads should be helpful. Align messaging with consumer needs and interests, such as:

Product or category they viewed

Seasonal promotion, product, service or event

New products

Accessories for things they have purchased

Sale or promotion

You’re trying to be helpful and useful and facilitating the conversion from your end. So customize ads and landing pages based on the info you’ve used to create your lists. The more you know, the better you can deliver.

When to make exclusions? Sometimes your audience isn’t what they seem. Not everyone will buy no matter how many times you remarket. So they will build audiences with the sole purpose of exclusions.

As an example, they built a remarketing list targeting visitors of a page. Though CPC was somewhat high, lead volume was also high. They excluded visitors that spent less than 5 seconds on the site (to cut spend on uninterested consumers). The results? They noted a 50.3 percent decrease in CPA, from $84.61 to $42.51.

How do you get email addresses? Second-party data exchanges, co-sponsorships with other places. You get these emails and you put them in your remarketing list and start encouraging them. Customer Match freed your email lists and gave them room to breathe.

Now you can segment audiences in your CRM, including people who have never been to your website as well as previous customers, lost customers, etc. (see slide below).

You target or exclude your new audience list across devices and channels. This can improve the reach of your search, Gmail and YouTube campaigns.

AdWords generates “Similar Audience” lists from original email lists when eligible (only available for Gmail and YouTube).

He sees good match rates, as we see in this data from WordStream:

There’s a magic potion made from these tasks (ingredients):

Pull email list from your CRM.

Define audience segments before uploading.

Upload list into AdWords and create audience.

Create separate campaign for these targets.

Now you’re suddenly targeting people who have never been to your website.

Here’s another magical feat, getting a repeat app user.

Typically app download = success! But sometimes you put in all that effort in getting an app download and then open an account in the app and then never come back. Then your app is like a ghost town. So, there’s a way in AdWords to remarketing to people who have been to your app.

Similar Audiences

Google’s contextual engine monitors browsing activity on Display Network sites over the last 30 days and determines other users with similar behavior. If you segment your audiences, Google creates a similar audience for you. Voila!

With Similar Audiences, conversion rates are right around the same as other remarketing, so there’s your trick for more volume.

YouTube

The YouTube ecosystem is huge:

YouTube is getting more competitive, and your competition is going to be there if it’s not already. What are folks watching? The most active industries on YouTube are media, B2C technology, B2B technology, automotive, apparel, fast-moving consumer goods, food and beverage …

Looking at funnel position on YouTube by social network, and it shows that YouTube doesn’t close very well. It’s an introducing channel. You should see YouTube as a first-click attributor. Embrace the intent.

Remarket to YouTube viewers based on:

People who watch any of your videos

People who take an action on any of your videos

People who view your video as a TrueView in-stream video ad

People who visit or subscribe to your YouTube channel

To create your video RMKT lists, you can target anyone who viewed a video or viewed an ad. A lot of marketers using video are only posting 1–10 videos a year. Here are kinds of video creative content styles your organization might use:

Live action or on-location (70% fall into this category)

Testimonials or executive interviews (53%)

Combination of styles (45%)

Motion graphic 2D or 3D (42%)

Stock images or footage (40%)

Moving images or slide presentations (38%)

Animated explainers (27%)

Spokesperson or paid actor (26%)

Other (4%)

Everyone has the same restrictions — limited budget and time. But everyone’s facing the same challenges.

About the Author

Virginia Nussey is the content and media manager at Bruce Clay, Inc. She joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger. Today she produces and manages content for clients and BCI, including the company's website, blog, weekly podcast, monthly newsletter, multiple book titles and social media presence. Head over to her author page to connect on social.

2 responses to “Advanced Audience Targeting for Remarketing #SMX”

Nice writing.
Sometimes it seems like we take remarketing for granted. It generally performs well, so I often see campaigns that are set up with a pretty basic structure instead of taking the time to identify specific goals and aligning the appropriate audiences.
Remarketing really becomes exciting. I encourage people to view their audience as a pool of individuals – remembering that different individuals have different needs, preferences and priorities.
Thanks for sharing!

HQ Hours of Operation:
8:30am to 5:30 pm Pacific timeDays of Operation:
Monday through Friday – email works other times in many casesSupport Operations:
M-F 9:00 to 5:00 Email Support FormTraining Facility:
Please see the training facility map